Busiest routes
The same few lines carry most of the traffic: the nuncios writing home to Rome, the ambassadors of the Habsburgs and of France, and the Dutch envoys reporting to The Hague. Click a route to isolate it on the map, or a city on the map to see the routes through it.
About the data
Each arc is one document from a target's profile.json, the record kept for every cipher on this site. It is placed at the
city where the letter was written and the city it was sent to, as the notes state them. A court or a person is placed where they were at
that date. Letters whose sender or recipient cannot be located from the evidence are left off rather than guessed. So are the
cryptograms with no route at all, such as Voynich, Scorpion and the gold bars. The coastlines are modern (Natural Earth); the
map draws no frontiers, because they moved too often over five centuries. Colour gives the outcome of the write-up:
read, explained or found already read,
read in part, attempted.